


all seasons and their change

by venndaai



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Angst, Chronic Illness, Developing Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 03:32:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17358134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Benjamin and Hannibal, between grief and hope.





	all seasons and their change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [within_a_dream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/within_a_dream/gifts).



1.

When Hannibal made overtures to him, their first night of acquaintance, on the levee, in the darkness and silence, Benjamin had been surprised; but he had been even more surprised to find himself accepting, leaning into a delicate kiss, the fiddler’s instrument pressed awkwardly between them. Surprised, again, at the strength of his response. He had not thought himself interested in men. The few times he had admired a man, looked at them with an eye to what a woman- or a man- might find attractive, his interest had been directed towards truly beautiful specimens, those who might have been Greek statues come to life. The consumptive, middle-aged fiddler certainly did not fit into that category.

But in that dark and dreadful night of despair, Hannibal’s music was the only light, the only life in Benjamin’s world; he would have felt an attraction to anyone who produced such beauty, he thought, no matter what their appearance, and Hannibal’s courteous conversation, the flattery of his flirtation, his black eyes glittering in the moonlight, like Ayasha’s black eyes had glittered… each of these combined with the strangeness of the moment to set something on fire within him.

He had no experience with this. There had been opportunities, in Paris. Daniel Ben-Gideon had introduced him to a certain element of Parisian society, and Daniel himself had made a polite offer. But at first he had been too reserved, and then he had met Ayasha, gloriously fierce Ayasha who would not tolerate the slightest wandering of his gaze. And he had not wanted to wander.

He had looked, in the months since her death. He had seen her in other women, and nearly wept with the force of his longing for her. Hannibal, black eyes aside, bore absolutely no resemblance to Ayasha, and maybe that was part of why Benjamin was kissing him. He tasted like gin. His moustache tickled against Benjamin’s nose. His hand rested lightly on Benjamin’s cheek. Benjamin’s own hand was slower to curl around the fiddler’s thin neck- rested there for a moment as Benjamin hazily processed the strangeness of it, his hand on a white man’s bare neck, in the hot New Orleans night- and then slid upwards, his fingers taking stock of long loose hair, so much straighter than Ayasha’s.

“I’d invite you back to my estate, but as it is an attic above a whorehouse in a less than felicitous part of town…”

_God, what I have I gotten myself into?_ Benjamin thought, but distantly. Whatever it was, it could not be worse than the dark place where he had been alone an hour ago. If he did end up being robbed in an alley that was still better than standing on the edge of the pier contemplating the swiftness of the black water.

“I have a room,” he heard himself say. _God, God, what am I doing?_ The thought of Livia Levesque’s reaction if she could hear him proposing to bring an alcohol-sodden musician he’d met at three in the morning on the levee into her house for a spot of drunken sodomy was so funny he had to lean away from Hannibal for a moment to laugh. Hannibal laughed too, not knowing the joke but apparently willing to laugh simply at the unpredictability of life. His laugh was hoarse and soft and boyish.

“You are the very soul of generosity.”

No one stirred on the Rue Burgundy as they made their way down its familiar path, Benjamin finding himself frequently supporting his companion, though his own steps were not perfectly steady- Hannibal was freely generous with his gin, and the world had a softened, juniper-flavored tint to it. Hannibal also apparently could not stop quoting, and Benjamin could not restrain himself from finishing each quotation, a game that was waking up parts of his mind and memory that had lain dormant since his student days.

“There’s stairs,” Benjamin said, after he’d let them into the yard, hoping they could keep their voices quiet enough to avoid waking any of the inhabitants of the cottage. “Do you think we can manage them?”

Hannibal, hanging onto Benjamin’s shoulder, looked at the narrow steep stairs leading up the side of the brick kitchen, and declaimed, _“What glorious man, for high attempts prepared,/Dares greatly venture for a rich reward?”_

He looked at Benjamin expectantly. Benjamin shook his head.

“Homer?” he guessed. “I’m not nearly as familiar with “the poet who has taught Greece” as I am with the Bard of Avon, I’m afraid.”

“We must fix that,” Hannibal declared, “I shall find you a copy of the Iliad immediately- well- tomorrow; I have other intentions for tonight.”

“It nearly is tomorrow,” Benjamin said, but he helped Hannibal up the stairs, and unlocked the garconniere, and pulled Hannibal down onto the narrow bed.

It was darker than the levee, inside the room, but there were lights from the street, and stars inside the room, too, it seemed to Benjamin, dazzled by the gin and the competing forces of exhaustion and arousal, and by Hannibal's clever, delicate hands.

He did not think of Ayasha at all, then.

 

* * *

 

 2.

It had been half a year since his return to New Orleans, and it was still, every morning, a shock, to wake not to a dawn chill in the apartment on the Rue de l’Aube, to the murmur of voices and the clatter of carts from the street below, the purring of the cat on his pillow, the quiet morning prayers of his wife- but instead to humid heat in his mother’s house, his ears filled by the hum of insects, and, this morning, by the irregular wheezing breaths of the consumptive white man in his bed.

There was a moment when he did not recognize the stranger in his bed, the pale skeleton with its graying moustache and skull-like face; and then, somehow aware of Benjamin’s regard, the stranger’s breathing shifted, the eyes opened, and in that deep, coffee-dark gaze Benjamin found the memory of the present.

“I did not mean to wake you,” he whispered. A musician’s day did not begin until the evening, and they had been up late the previous night, talking and drinking. And Benjamin coveted every extra hour of rest he could steal for the violinist, whose disease often kept him in torturous wakefulness through the night.

_“Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,/with charm of earliest birds,”_ Hannibal whispered.

_“With thee conversing I forget all time,”_ Benjamin said, the quotation backwards but perfectly serviceable, in this moment of morning peace. “Does your head ache as much as mine?”

Hannibal chuckled softly. “It takes more than that amount of wine to get me hungover, _amicus carissimus_.” He coughed, and Benjamin felt himself tense.

“I’ll make tea,” he said.

Hannibal swallowed- Benjamin watched the motion of his long, thin neck- and breathed in and out, shallow but uninterrupted. “I’m fine,” he said, and draped his arm over Benjamin’s shoulder. “Don’t get up.”

Benjamin had never had a bed partner so partial to physical contact as Hannibal Sefton. He might have explained it as a practical method of transmitting the body heat Hannibal could not himself produce, had the air in their room not already been at least eighty degrees. Benjamin bent his arm around Hannibal’s knifelike shoulders and pulled the other man close. With a happy sigh, Hannibal wriggled half onto Benjamin’s chest, tucking his graying head beneath Benjamin’s chin, their legs tangled under the thin linen sheet.

Benjamin smiled. Listening to Hannibal’s calm breathing, feeling the rise and fall of his chest against Benjamin’s, the tension left him, and he drifted once more into sleep.

 

Later, over a breakfast-lunch of chicory-flavored coffee and pralines, Benjamin scanned the advertisements in the Gazette, and could not quite stop himself from considering the future. It was a peaceful moment. The lady of the house having already departed for the summer, Hannibal had not had to depart in secrecy but was sitting the kitchen, coaxing a tune of heartaching sweetness from his battered old violin. The air smelled of coffee and sugar.

“What written words have you so engrossed?” Hannibal asked, during a pause between notes.

“Looking at rooms to rent in the Quarter,” Benjamin said, “I might be able to afford one, after another winter.” _With a loan from my mother,_ but he didn’t voice that part.

“But why?” Hannibal asked, perplexed. “Is the Duchess Livia threatening to have you removed?”

“No,” Benjamin said. He did not feel up to the task of explaining the love and anger and disappointment and resentment that lay between him and the woman who had given birth to him, so instead he found himself voicing another thought, that he had meant to keep hidden. “But- we could share a room.”

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. The violin was silent, and after a moment he could hear the bow being placed carefully on the floorboards. Benjamin took a sip of his coffee, to fortify himself, and then forced himself to look up, to meet those dark eyes in that pale, worn-down face.

He saw sadness there, and pity, and pain.

“It wouldn’t be much,” Benjamin said, as though more words could fix what his earlier words had broken, “but we could split the rent, and it’d be better than the mercy of Kentucky Williams-”

Hannibal raised a thin finger, and Benjamin stopped talking. “I’d ask where you thought to find an upstanding citizen who’d rent to two lodgers of our contrasting colors,” he said, gently, “or one so incurious as to not discover the nature of our cohabitation, but I know you’re better aware than I of such difficulties.”

Of course it was true. In Paris it would have been entirely possible, but here- much as Benjamin hated Hannibal’s residency in the Swamp, he was aware that it was one of the few choices open to a man whose bed partners came in various shapes.

It was his morning confusion that had made him even consider it, that moment of not knowing where he was. Remembering the peace and comfort of life with Ayasha, in their little suite of rooms, with the cats and her dressmaker’s dummy, their friends down the hall and the shop downstairs. Was it a crime to hope he might one day know some of that peace again?

Hannibal seemed to read it all in his face. He put down the violin, stood and walked around the table, to sit next to Benjamin and take one of Benjamin’s hands in his, his white insectlike hands small as a woman’s. “I’m sorry, my dear friend, but you can’t build a life with me,” he said. “I’d drink away your money, and sleep with all your friends. _Neque enim attinet naturae repugnare nec quicquam sequi, quod assequi non queas,_ as Cicero so wisely said _._ ”

“Perhaps I’d reform you,” Benjamin said, hoping to turn the conversation to a more joking mood. But Hannibal’s face was uncharacteristically unsmiling.

“You’re still young,” he said. “One day you’ll remarry. You’ll raise a family in a lovely house, and grow old surrounded by grandchildren.”

Benjamin blinked, feeling rather as though the gentle man holding his hand had slapped him violently. “Or I’ll die of the yellow fever next summer, or be shot by a Kaintuck next week. The future is never certain.” The cholera had taught him that.

Or, just as likely, the market for music in New Orleans would not get any kinder, and he would never extricate himself from his current situation, precariously balancing on the edge of poverty. He'd never earn enough to support a family and would end up like Uncle Bichet, old as a stone and still playing to exhaustion every season. 

“Maybe,” Hannibal said, and now he was smiling again. “All we do know for certain is that I _am_ going to die.”

He said it with a calm serenity that Benjamin knew he did not feel, and he wondered how much this conversation was costing Hannibal, how much Benjamin was costing him by refusing to accept the unalterable.

Benjamin, his pride hurt, wanted to stand and leave. Instead he turned his hand and brought Hannibal’s cold white fingers up to his lips, trying to express without words his love for these hands, for the music they made that had drawn him out of darkness, and the tenderness with which they had touched his body.

“Perhaps it would be better,” Hannibal murmured, “if I ceased imposing on your hospitality. As Aeneas should have, before he ruined Dido, but of course those ancients always did overstay their welcomes-”

There was only one reliable way to make Hannibal stop talking, and Benjamin employed it.

Twelve hours later, when they were stumbling up the stairs bone-tired from a night of playing for the rich and famous, when Benjamin had almost succeeded in forgetting the conversation, Hannibal, leaning back against the whitewashed rail, said quietly, “It’s good to see you thinking of the future again. _This horror will grow mild, this darkness light_. But do not figure me in your plans, Benjamin. _A walking shadow, a poor player_ , that is all I can be.”

A scornful grunt was Benjamin’s only response to this, being too tired to do more than unlatch the door and fall onto the bed still wearing his boots. But a moment later he felt Hannibal settle down next to him, and the bed was too small for them not to lie together.

His mind turned in tired circles. Was that really what he was foolish enough to desire? The home, the false sense of safety he’d had in Paris, but here, with a white man, who for all the sweetness of his music and his company could never understand Benjamin’s deepest fears and passions the way Ayasha had? Surely not.

The next day they were not engaged to play, but Benjamin had a student to teach. He went out to the lesson and when he came back Hannibal and his books and his violin had all vanished. _It is for the best, amicus meus,_ read the folded note left on the dresser, in the most beautiful handwriting Benjamin had ever seen.

Benjamin stood there, holding the note. It was hot as hell in the small room. Only another week or two before summer truly began, before the music ended, before fever season. His first since his return. 

_'With thee conversing I forget all time,'_ he thought, ' _All seasons and their change, all please alike.'_ But time did not forget him.

 

* * *

 

 3.

One year later- nearly two years since Paris, and the date that was always in the back of Benjamin’s mind, the division between past and present, death and life- one year later and it was June again, fever season again, and Benjamin returned to town from Mandeville, went to his sister’s house and collapsed in a chair in her kitchen, exhausted in body and spirit, back and arms aching, stomach still queasy, weighed down by the knowledge of the evil in the human spirit. Olympe was there, _thank you, Blessed Mother,_ but asleep, resting. Paul was with her. Of Marie Laveau there was no sign. Rose was in the kitchen, and he startled to see her.

She nodded towards towards the corner by the stove, and he saw Hannibal, curled up in his own chair. “I couldn’t stay with him all day,” she confessed, “and he wasn’t well enough to leave, so I brought him here. The children have been looking after him.”

“Irresponsible of you, Rose, to expose them to such a corrupting influence,” Benjamin said. He felt lighter. His exhaustion pressed just as heavily, but the darkness of the night was lifting. It felt good to see Hannibal and Rose in this house that was far closer to his mind when the word “home” was spoken than the garconniere on the Rue Burgundy. If Minou were here the picture would be complete, he thought, and then felt slightly shocked at the belated realization that Rose and Hannibal were now fully inextricably ensconced in his mental picture of “family”.

He’d had friends in Paris, very good, dear friends, but family had been him and Ayasha and the cats, and a pang in his heart for Olympe and Minou across the sea. Paul and the children were new. Rose and Hannibal were new. It was undoubtedly the largest his circle of family had ever been.

“Did you find what you were looking for, in Mandeville?” Rose asked. She must have seen the answer in his face; she shook her head, and changed the topic. “Hannibal’s doing better.”

He must have been, for her to have managed to get him down several blocks. Benjamin had carried the fiddler considerable distances before, but Rose was not six and a half feet with a surgeon’s experience of handling bodies, and she couldn’t weigh much more than Hannibal himself.

“I’m glad.” He shut his eyes, and then hurriedly opened them. In the black behind his eyelids he could see again the stairs, the door hanging ajar, the cold, outstretched hand…

It had smelled exactly the same.

“Ben?” Rose sounded concerned.

She would understand, Benjamin reminded himself. She had watched her students die, nursed them in hot dark rooms.

But that had been the fever, not the cholera. And she had not been in that room in Paris. Had not stood outside that door smelling Death, knowing what she’d find beyond it…

He looked at Hannibal, in his warm corner. Someone had wrapped him in Olympe’s softest blanket. Hannibal’s shoulders rose and fell irregularly, lungs rattling even in his sleep, but the off-white of the blanket showed no spots of red.

Benjamin had gone up those stairs, breathed in that smell, seen the open door and it had once again been the fifteenth of August, 1832, he had known the way you do in dreams, the way ghosts must know, as they repeat eternally their final moments of agony, that he was going to go into the room and see someone he loved on the floor, their body contorted by a horrible, lonely death.

He understood now, what Hannibal had been trying to spare him from. And understood that it had been an unsuccessful effort. He would live with the fear forever, regardless. This past week, Olympe in the Cabildo as the fever spread. Dominique, in a bed of blood. He had chosen to come back to this city, and give hostages to fate once more.

Rose looked over at the sleeping Hannibal too, and then turned her face down to the slim volume in her lap, the one she had been translating. The motion caught Benjamin’s attention, provided welcome distraction. Rose said, very quietly, “He speaks of you often. Even before you and I met, I think, though not by name.”

She looked up, looked at Benjamin, gray-green eyes behind oval spectacles, and he knew that she knew. It sat strange in his stomach. No one else did, as far as he was aware- no one but Kentucky Williams and Railspike and their sistren, who could not have failed to deduce it, being so familiar with Hannibal’s proclivities. Otherwise the fiddler had been remarkably discreet, even when drunk to the gills. Which spoke, Benjamin had sometimes thought, of habits formed since youth. Though Hannibal had, Benjamin assumed, been born to the same wealth that had given Daniel Ben-Gideon his fearlessness, money alone was not always enough.

Livia and Dominique, Benjamin knew, would never guess. They were both experts at selective perception. They had a certain image of him, in their minds, and it would be very hard to work for him to change it. That wasn’t always a bad thing.

Olympe… come to think of it, Olympe probably did know.

And Rose.

“It has made me happy,” Rose said. “To know that he has companionship.”

Benjamin closed his eyes, and the scene replayed in his head, the stairs, the door, the cold hand. Let it play out further. Cheap burial in the potter’s field, a Stradivarius collecting dust under Rose’s bed. And Benjamin, playing at every opera, music hall, ball and cotillion in New Orleans, waiting each time for a cue from a first violinist who was not there, who played perhaps instead for the court of Hades, and doubtless brought the Queen of the Underworld to tears.

Turning every corner in Montmartre and expecting to see Ayasha there.

Could that madness afflict him again?

The stairs again, the door, but this time Hannibal was alive, and this time Benjamin held him as he vomited, the way it had happened in reality, the way it hadn’t happened in Paris. He remembered that, the fear and the horror and the feeling of his friend in his arms. He remembered stumbling down to the kitchen, feeling the cramps and the nausea begin, how he had begged God to stop the nightmare, and then he had thought, at least I won’t be alone.

“There’s a bed made up for you,” Rose said. Benjamin nodded, and stood up, muscles protesting, and tapped Hannibal softly on the shoulder. It took a few gentle repetitions before the bruised eyelids fluttered open.

He deposited Hannibal on the bed in the guest room. “If you’d be so kind as to locate one of my bottles,” Hannibal said, “I might avoid coughing on you all night.” The bottle was procured, and Benjamin did not much mind the opium smell, as Hannibal did indeed appear to fall asleep almost immediately after taking a swig.

“You have a bed?” Benjamin asked Rose.

“In the parlour,” she said. “Goodnight, Ben.”

Benjamin lay on the piled blankets on the floor by the bed. Hannibal’s hand dangled over the edge of the mattress, and Benjamin took it and held it for a while. Companionship, he thought, trying the word out. And he gave a prayer of thanks to the Mother, that his family was safe.

 


End file.
